 A grouping of languages with a shared, but fairly distinct origin  The most common language family is the Indo- European family  English is the most widely used language  Mandarin is spoken by the largest number of native speakers  Romance languages form a sub-family in the Indo- European family and include Spanish, French, and Italian

 A standard language is a language designated for use by the government, schools, media, and other aspects of public life  An official language is one endorsed by the government as the one everyone should know and use  A country may have more than one official language

 Bilingualism is the ability to communicate in two languages  Multilingualism is the ability to communicate in more than two languages  Pidgin is a combination of languages  Ex: Spanglish  It becomes a creole language if the Pidgin language is the first language of the people that speak it

 An established language that comes to be spoken and understood over a large area  English is lingua franca for most of the world  Toponymy: the study of place names  Extinct Language: languages that were once used, but no longer spoken  Revived Language: the reclamation of an extinct language  Ex: Hebrew

 English is part of the Indo-European language family  A language family is a collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed long before recorded history.  Indo-European is the language family with the most speakers.

 Within language families are language branches  A language branch is a collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed thousands of years ago.  Indo-European is divided into eight branches: Germanic, Romance, Baltic-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, and Armenian

 English is part of the West Germanic Language Group  A language group is a collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past, and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary

 Includes the languages of German, English, Afrikaans, and Dutch  German is spoken mainly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland  English is spoken on every continent (key places: Great Britain, United States, Canada, India, Japan, and Australia)  Afrikaans is spoken in South Africa  Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands

 There are over 669 million native speakers  The Germanic branch also includes North Germanic languages of Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Danish]

 The Romance Branch evolved from the Latin language spoken by Romans 2,000 years ago  It has 859 million native speakers.  The four most common Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian  French and Spanish are two of the six official UN languages

 Romanian is spoken in Romania and Moldova.  Other Romance Languages include Romansh (one of Switzerland’s four official languages), and Catalan (spoken in Spain, and the official language of Andorra)  Haitian Creole is a language spoken in Haiti

 Latin was spread by the soldiers of the Roman Empire  When they conquered a group of people, they taught them Latin  The people spoke a different form of Latin called Vulgar Latin, or Latin of the People.  Ex: The Latin word for horse is equus, but the vulgar Latin word for horse was caballus. Italian: cavallor, Spanish: caballo, Portuguese: cavalo, and French: cheval

 Both of these languages are important around the world due to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism  Spanish is the official language in 18 Latin American countries  Portuguese is the official language of Brazil  This is due to the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1493

 When a language is a mix of a colonial language and an indigenous language, it is said to be a creole or creolized language  A creolized language forms when a colonized group adopts the language of the dominant group, but makes some changes

 The roots of the Slavic language are Asian  Due to isolation of different groups when they arrived in Eastern Europe, different languages emerged  Languages include: Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Baltic, and Bulgarian

 Russian is the most widely spoken language, and is spoken by 80 percent of the Russians  Russian is one of the six official languages of the UN  Ukrainian is spoken in the Ukraine, and Belorusian in Belarus.  The Baltic languages include Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian.

 Other widely spoken languages are Polish (Poland), Czech (Czech Republic), and Slovak (Slovakia)  Speakers of Czech and Slovak can understand each other  Slovenian is in Slovenia, Macedonian in Macedonia, and Serbia-Croatian is spoken by Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs.

 The Indo-Iranian branch has the most speakers.  It has over 100 languages with over 1 billion native speakers  The branch includes the languages of Persian (Farsi), Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi

 One-third of Indians use an Indic languages called Hindi  It is spoken many different ways, but there is a common written form of the language called Devanagari  India’s constitution recognizes 18 official languages

 Pakistan’s principal language is called Urdu, and the written form of the language is Arabic  Bangladesh’s official language is Bengali

 Indo-Iranian languages are spoken in Iran and neighboring countries  Persian or Farsi is the main language in Iran.  Other languages include Kurdish and Pathan.  All of these are written in Arabic.

 Greek and Armenian are in the Indo- European family, but are not language branches  Greek is spoken in Greece, and has 12 million native speakers.  Armenian is spoken in Armenia, and has 6 million native speakers.

 The existence of a single ancestor cannot be proved with certainty, because it would have existed thousands of years before the invention of writing or recorded history.  Individual Indo-European languages share common root words for winter and snow but not for ocean.  Therefore, linguists conclude that original Proto-Indo-European speakers probably lived in a cold climate, or one that had a winter season, but did not come in contact with oceans.

Fig. 5-9: In the Kurgan theory, Proto-Indo-European diffused from the Kurgan hearth north of the Caspian Sea, beginning about 7,000 years ago.

Nomadic Warrior Theory

Sedentary Farmer Theory

Fig. 5-10: In the Anatolian hearth theory, Indo-European originated in Turkey before the Kurgans and diffused through agricultural expansion.

Fig. 5-11: Distribution of the world’s main language families. Languages with more than 100 million speakers are named.

Fig. 5-11a: The percentage of world population speaking each of the main language families. Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan together represent almost 75% of the world’s people.

 The Sino-Tibetan family encompasses languages spoken in the People’s Republic of China as well as several smaller countries in Southeast Asia.

 There is no single Chinese language.  Spoken by approximately three-fourths of the Chinese people, Mandarin is by a wide margin the most used language in the world.  Other Sinitic branch languages are spoken by tens of millions of people in China.  The Chinese government is imposing Mandarin countrywide.

 The structure of Chinese languages is quite different (from Indo-European).  They are based on 420 one- syllable words.  This number far exceeds the possible one-syllable sounds that humans can make, so Chinese languages use each sound to denote more than one thing.  The listener must infer the meaning from the context in the sentence and the tone of voice the speaker uses.  In addition, two one-syllable words can be combined.

Fig. 5-13: Chinese language ideograms mostly represent concepts rather than sounds. The two basic characters at the top can be built into more complex words.

 In addition to the Chinese languages included in the Sinitic branch, the Sino- Tibetan family includes two smaller branches, Austro-Thai and Tibeto-Burman.

 Chinese cultural traits have diffused into Japanese society, including the original form of writing the Japanese language.  Japanese is written in part with Chinese ideograms, but it also uses two systems of phonetic symbols.

 Korean is usually classified as a separate language family.  Korean is written not with ideograms but in a system known as hankul (phonetic).  In this system, each letter represents a sound.

 Austro-Asiatic, spoken by about 1 percent of the world’s population, is based in Southeast Asia.  Vietnamese (is) the most spoken tongue of the language family.  The Vietnamese alphabet was devised in the seventh century by Roman Catholic missionaries.

 The Afro-Asiatic-—once referred to as the Semito- Hamitic—language family includes Arabic and Hebrew, as well as a number of languages spoken primarily in northern Africa and southwestern Asia.  Arabic is the major Afro-Asiatic language, an official language in two dozen countries of North Africa and southwestern Asia, from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula.

 The Altaic and Uralic language families were once thought to be linked as one family because the two display similar word formation, grammatical endings, and other structural elements.  Recent studies, however, point to geographically distinct origins.

 Every European country is dominated by Indo- European speakers, except for three: Estonia, Finland, and Hungary.  The Estonians, Finns, and Hungarians speak languages that belong to the Uralic family, first used 7,000 years ago by people living in the Ural Mountains north of the Kurgan homeland.

Fig. 5-14: The 1,000 or more languages of Africa are divided among five main language families, including Austronesian languages in Madagascar.

 More than 95 percent of the people in sub-Saharan Africa speak languages of the Niger-Congo family, which includes six branches with many hard to classify languages.  The remaining 5 percent speak languages of the Khoisan or Nilo-Saharan families.

 The largest branch of the Niger- Congo family is the Benue- Congo branch, and its most important language is Swahili.  Its vocabulary has strong Arabic influences.  Swahili is one of the few African languages with an extensive literature.

 Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by a few million people in north- central Africa, immediately north of the Niger-Congo language region.  The best known of these languages is Maasai, spoken by the tall warrior-herdsmen of east Africa.

 The third important language family of sub-Saharan Africa— Khoisan—is concentrated in the southwest.  Khoisan language use clicking sounds.

 About 6 percent of the world’s people speak an Austronesian language, once known as the Malay-Polynesian family.  The most frequently used Austronesian language is Malay-Indonesian.  The people of Madagascar speak Malagasy, which belongs to the Austronesian family, even though the island is separated by 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) from any other Austronesian-speaking country.

 Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, displays problems that can arise from the presence of many speakers of many languages.  Groups living in different regions of Nigeria have often battled.  Nigeria reflects the problems that can arise when great cultural diversity—and therefore language diversity— is packed into a relatively small region. Fig. 5-15: More than 200 languages are spoken in Nigeria, the largest country in Africa (by population). English, considered neutral, is the official language.

 Thousands of languages are extinct languages  The eastern Amazon region of Peru in the sixteenth century (had) more than 500 languages.  Only 57 survive today, half of which face extinction.  Gothic was widely spoken in Eastern and Northern Europe in the third century A.D.  The last speakers of Gothic lived in the Crimea in Russia in the sixteenth century.  Many Gothic people switched to speaking the Latin language after their conversion to Christianity.